Join three of the voice AI industry’s leading minds to debate whether voice is living up to its promise and what should happen next.
Does voice first suck and is it stuck?
When I was on the Voicebot podcast, Bret asked me whether we’re going through a voice first winter. I said that I didn’t think so, nor did I really care. There are opportunities to do good work and enhance people’s lives regardless. However, there has been an undercurrent in pockets of the industry where some folks are becoming frustrated that voice hasn’t reached its potential (however you define that).
Over the past few weeks, founder of WitLingo, Ahmed Bouzid was involved in a conversation at the popular VoiceLunch meet where a participant stated that:
‘Beyond the weather, time, and the occasional timer and alarm,’ they mused out loud, ‘am I myself really using my Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant that much in my life? I mean, really and honestly, am I? No, actually, not really…. So, if I am not using them that much and yet I am such a believer in Voice First, what hope is there for the rest of the world?’
He wrote a piece summarising his thoughts. This coincided with a post from Bespoken.io founder, John Kelvie’s post claiming voice is stuck.
The primary questions raised in both of these two pieces are:
- Is voice living up to its promise?
- Where is the true value in voice first?
- Has there been enough improvement in the technology and ecosystem to support its own ecosystem like the App Store?
To debate this, we brought along Voicebot.ai founder Bret Kinsella, together with Ahmed and John to figure out where we actually stand and where we need to go next.
We also continued this discussion on Clubhouse afterwards. Follow @kanesimms on Clubhouse for more open ended after show discussions.
Links
Read voicebot.ai
Check out WitLingo and Bespoken
Read Voice is stuck
Read The #VoiceFirst User Interface Has a Use Case Fit Problem
Read Voice first sucks
